October 2012

10/17/2012

For the past couple of months, I've been tinkering with Yet Another Todo App. Currently called "Today", it's designed to emulate a behavior that turns me from productivity-Clark Kent to productivity-Superman.

On days when I'm productive, I start out my morning by writing out a list of everything I need to do. Sometimes, I've done that on paper. Sometimes, I've done that in a text file. The precise medium doesn't really matter.

There are two things that do matter:

Before I get sidetracked by life, I start my day by writing out a list.

At the end of the day, I'm done. No matter how far I've gotten, I retire my list at the end of the day. It's ok if I don't cross off every task. It's ok (but not ideal) if I don't check off any tasks.

The next day, I do it again. Lists should start from a blank page every single day. Never carry over yesterday's list to tomorrow.

Tasks should:

Be actionable. If you can't actually do something, it doesn't belong on a list of things to do.

Take less than 20 minutes or so

Today is a tiny little micro-application. As of now, you don't need to log in or identify yourself to use it. When you first visit the app, you see a big textarea. Treat it like your legal pad or scratch buffer. Jot down what needs doing today. Once you've gotten everything out of your head, click the big blue button.

Presto! Your lines of text have turned into a todo list.

As you check things off, Today keeps track of the amount of time since your last checkmark. (Right now, I'm running a little behind - I'm at 25:27.)

On the side of the screen, you'll find little a progress bar, a place to write down new tasks that come up throughout the day and a place to set your email address.

Here's where the real magic happens - 18 hours after you start work, Today emails you a final copy of your list and stops letting you check things off.

The next day, Today is ready for you to start a new list.

There are a lot of task tracking systems out there. I've written more than a few of 'em myself, but this one seems to actually make me productive more consistently than anything else I've built to date. And it doesn't get heavier the longer I use it.

If you've read this far and think that my crazy productivity hack might work for you, drop me a line at jesse@fsck.com and tell me you'd like to try Today.

10/05/2012

Last night, I was playing around with my new 3G Kindle Paperwhite. (I earn a few bucks if you buy from Amazon after clicking links to Amazon in this blog post)

(It is, in fact, the nicest kindle I have ever owned. The new screen is gorgeous. The touch screen is responsive. Large parts of the UI are just HTML5 apps, which means that the system is quite flexible. Sometimes more flexible than intended. When the Kindle Touch first got pwned, it was through the music player app, which didn't escape JavaScript in ID3 tags.)

One of the things that bums me out about the Kindle Touch and Kindle Paperwhite is that they don't support browsing over 3G. It's a feature I used rarely on my Kindle 2 and Kindle 3. But when I needed it, I really, really needed it.

Then I clicked on "Link my account to Twitter" and got a very familiar OAuth login page.

It was at about this point that I remembered what I'd seen poking around inside the Kindle Touch's UI toolkit. Different applications were basically implemented as little webkit containers with different local and remote permissions. The browser's container was, for example, configured to let you reach Amazon and Wikipedia over 3G and to require WIFI for everything else.

Now, this "Manage Your Social Networks" app pretty clearly lets you get to Twitter and Facebook (and Amazon), but how locked down is it?

To make a long story short, it's about as locked down as a 1999-era web kiosk.

Back in the early days of the web, people didn't have web browsers in their pockets, so "web kiosks" were a frequent sight in forward-thinking public locales like libraries and corporate lobbies. They were invariably locked down. You couldn't launch Telnet or download a copy of Snood. In fact, they were mostly set up to only let you browse a single website. The usual mechanism for this fascist policy was to use a hacked up web browser without a URL bar. Sometimes, you were just out of luck. More often, you got to demonstrate your l33t sk1llz at a game called "clicks to Yahoo!" or its more nefarious sibling -- "clicks to porn." Somewhere on every website is a link to another website. Back in the day, an easy target was a "best viewed in Netscape 3.0" or "Best viewed in Internet Explorer" button - from netscape.com, you could get anywhere.

Today, well, today you have many options. My first path through this game led me from http://kindle.amazon.com to http://amazon.com/ to http://www.woot.com to http://reddit.com. From reddit, you can get just about anywhere, though you might have to endure more mindless yammering than you'd like. For my proper demo, I went for something a bit more useful (if via a slightly more circuitous route.)

Rather than signing in to Twitter to let Amazon tweet on your behalf, break the flow by clicking the little bird in the upper left corner.

Then click "Sign in"

Scroll to the bottom of the page and search for @google

Click on @google's profile

Click on the URL to get to Google Support.

Scroll to the bottom of the page and click "Google Home"

Google something.

Now, I don't mean to suggest that this turns the Kindle Paperlight into a useful 3G web browser, but when you're desperate, you're desperate.

(Also, if you're just trying to read Twitter or Facebook, it's actually not that painful.)